This is a bit of a ramble, but it does hit its points, so here goes…
I was just watching Mark Williams’ Industrial Revelations, which aired on the Discovery Channel last night.
I love the show and its subject matter: I am always entranced by the oily, noisy, lumps of steel, brass and leather, the ingenuity of the designers and builders and the sheer daring of the project sponsors.
The section on the construction of the Cromford Canal activated my muse. The canal was built by Sir Richard Arkwright (who was one of the richest people in the world at his death) to bring raw cotton from Liverpool to his mills. As business boomed, the capacity of the canal was filled and so the Cromford and High Peak Railway was constructed to allow expansion to continue. The machinery (beautiful steam engines, etc.) continues working to this day; although it has been rendered obsolete by changes of fortune, it has not failed.
Interestingly, the canal was built by one generation and the railway built by a second generation of the same family: William Jessop and his son, Josias.
This got me thinking: about how many times I have been given a brief along the lines of “we know that the system is stuffed and needs to be completely upgraded, but we don’t want (dare/can afford) to change it, so please just twiddle around the edges and keep it plodding along.” I have worked on code that has also been touched by older/younger siblings (roughly equivalent to different generations in “IT years”…); my brief was to fix but not change, the unspoken attitude was “it ain’t broke, really, so don’t change it” or “she’ll be right, mate” or perhaps even “it’s close enough for Government work.”
Let’s go back: Josias didn’t try to simply fix up his father’s canal (widen it, make the horses move a bit faster, put lighting along it to ensure that 24-hour operation was possible, maybe play around with a few other tweaks); he was brave enough to say “we need a new approach, we need this new technology, so bring on the railway.”
How different these attitudes are!
Sadly, I feel that the spirit, the vision, the will to do this has vanished from our society. We seem to be too fat and comfortable, too intransigent, too resistant to even the smallest change to actually do much of anything worthwhile, it seems.
Here in Sunny Brisbane, I have seen people tearfully protesting because a nearby roadside noise barrier was painted red by the council. The affected residents seemingly couldn’t say what colour was actually appropriate, but they knew that their world was going to implode as a result of having a red barrier.
As in life, so in the IT world.
I have seen (and been a part of) research institutions set up and then left to gradually wither on the vine; I have seen (and been a part of) software engineering ‘Incubators’ set up and then almost instantly destroyed by the threat of a punitive tax ruling. There’s no driving force, no grand plan to force these things along so instead they just churn away in the background and the best that one seems to be able to achieve is a zero-sum game.
Take a look at the way the Australian IT job market has developed over the past few years: there seem to be a multitude of positions for project managers, analysts, documenters, support personnel, etc. There are very few for developers and those that are out there are for junior-grade people. My conclusion from this is that nobody is doing anything new, the PMs, analysts, etc. are all working in holding patterns but not pushing anything forward. We seem to be restricted to cutting the grass on the banks of the canal, hoping that will improve things. We need the railway engineer.
I can’t help but think back to the amazing achievements of the Industrial Revolution, many of which still stand even today. Consider how London is still benefiting from its city-spanning underground system (opened in 1863)…
Would the underground get built today? We have vastly superior technology so it would be simpler to achieve, but would the initial proposal even get past the “first post”?
I think not.
Here in Brisbane, we are abandoning capital works like rail corridors, roads (even simple road upgrades) and tunnels left, right and centre.
The Powers That Be claim that this is “due to the ‘credit crunch’ and the other impacts of the financial crisis.”
I say that this is truly due to a lack of drive, of will, of vision. Perhaps it is about abandoning the future, as well?
I wonder if Richard Arkwright would have said “OK, I don’t have the money in my pocket today, so I’ll wait.” I suspect he actually would have said “I stand to make a sh*tload of motza by this…bring it on.”
Back to the IT world again: where is the Ozzie Google, Facebook, Amazon? These organisations don’t depend on the presence of natural resource, they aren’t restricted by national boundaries so why hasn’t Australia–which is well-known as an early adopter of (other people’s) technology–got its act together? We do have wotif, I am happy to say; we should have many more wotifs.
Having seen China’s massive change and ongoing development over the last 20 years, I can’t help but come to the conclusion that we are seeing the rise of a new industrial power and of a new people who “can do.”
China (and India, and to lesser degrees Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, …) is also beginning to think big and build for the future. They aren’t abandoning their future, they are preparing for it, shaping it.
Truly, we complacent Ozzies (and brits and yanks, etc.) are going to be left well and truly behind.
